How To Draw A Car In Sketchup

I've seen a lot of requests here and on other forums about how to model a car in SketchUp... and sadly not many DIY Tutorials on how to do it.

There are many ways to model a car, so I encourage everyone to model the way it suits you, and I'm not claiming these are the rules you must follow or how it must be done.

Please try to keep this thread clean and if you have any questions, feel free to ask them, but as long as they are dealing with modeling cars/trucks... and most of all please do not hi-jack this thread. Also, this is quiet a large project so bare with me as I will be updating this thread over the course of the next few days (or how ever long it takes me to model this project).

First and foremost, when it comes to modeling any car, try to find as many reference pictures as possible and even blueprints in the highest resolution possible (this will come in handy).

A great reference for blueprints for those who would like to model as close to the real thing as possible:

SMC Car Blueprints

Blueprints Database

Now, find the vehicle you'd like to model. In this case mine will be a 1951 Chevrolet Pickup (modeling for my 1949 Chevy Fire Engine, Chevy Pickups from 1949 to 51 were relatively the same).

Anyway, let's begin.

Open SketchUp and "IMPORT" the blueprint picture (make sure it is in jpeg form).

Select your blueprint and insert it at the origin. Select a size for the blueprint, in this case it asked for a distance and I entered 50' (keep that in mind).

Now Import your blueprint 2 more times (make each 50', or whatever distance you entered before, just remember, stay consistent). Move them around and make your "staging ground" look something like this. Make note of the 3 views, "TOP", "SIDE" and "Front" view. Keep these in mind as I will reference them from time to time.

Now take note how large "Bryce" is (Bryce is the default "guy" you see at the origin each time you open SketchUp). Bryce is small compared to the blueprints, in this case I made the height of all the blueprints 50', the higher the resolution of the blueprints the larger you can make them and the easier they are to work with.

Select all the print views and place them on layer 1 (this will come in handy when you need to hide the prints to edit our components).